


El Condor Pasa

by orphan_account



Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: Domestic, F/M, Gen, M/M, Post Movie, adventures in the stereotypical lecture halls of Oxford, baby Gottlieb, casa gottlieb, it's about time Newt gets another tattoo, kaiju sympathy, newt is an awkward houseguest, residual drift side effects
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-08-04
Updated: 2013-09-17
Packaged: 2017-12-22 09:17:48
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,945
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/911521
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Newt had expected the world to end, while Hermann had hoped that it wouldn't... and now that it hadn't, Newt's finding life significantly less exciting than when he'd been fighting for it with all he was worth.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. oxford is a stereotype

It’s not like he had wanted the world to end.

Newt was a big fan of the world as a whole. He didn’t have much to complain about. It's just that he'd been so set on dying like a rockstar in a blaze of glory that he’d never really taken the time to consider that there would even be an alternative to consider.

They drink until the alcohol runs out. Hong Kong is still burning, the poisoned carcass of the kaiju seeping into the foundations of the city, but the planet’s been saved. Mankind has been saved. And that’s pretty damn awesome.

It takes three days, after which everybody wakes up and gets back to work, nursing tragically epic hangovers.

That afternoon, at an embarrassingly late hour, Newt finally crawls out of bed. He makes his way back to the lab expecting some scolding from Hermann, who has either ignored the fact that he and Newt are roughly the same age (thus, giving Hermann no valid claim to this superiority he wielded like a weapon on most days), or decided early in his career as Mankind’s Last Hope™ to just not give a damn.

Instead, Newt finds half of the lab in boxes.

“Going somewhere?” he says to Hermann, who is carefully wrapping some delicate piece of equipment in bubble-wrap.

“Home,” he says.

Instantly, Newt knows. He’d been there, in the drift, walking in through the front door, stamping wet boots on the mat, being greeted with a kiss from Vanessa, face still flushed, nose still cold, having returned only minutes earlier, this domestic sort of stereotype that Hermann feels silly for wanting but still wants it all the same…

Newt knows about home, and doesn’t need to ask anything else.

He also knows that Hermann will never ask him about ever going back to any home of his own. He’d seen that in the drift too, and kept blessedly quiet about it.

Picking up a sheet of bubble-wrap, Newt idly pops the bubbles with his thumb. “So soon? We’ve only just saved the world.”

“We closed the breach,” Hermann says, Newt not missing the pride in his voice on the ‘we’. “There’s no need for my equations now, and I’m no expert in kaiju remains. My skill set has become obsolete.”

“Don’t say that,” Newt says. “You bring so much else to the table that would be perfect for disaster relief. I mean, for one thing, I know we could really use your interpersonal skills…”

“Give me that,” Hermann says, snatching the bubble-wrap out of Newt’s hands.

“Then again, I’m not the one with the hot pregnant wife waiting for me halfway around the world from the Pacific ocean,” Newt concedes. “I guess it makes sense.”

“I thought it best to leave our very last kaiju to the groupie.”

“Trust me,” Newt says. “Now that they’re not destroying the world anymore, you’re gonna start to see a whole new side of them, and then I think you’re gonna start to miss them a little bit too. You're gonna start to feel a lot less disdain for me, one of these days.”

He had already seen it. In the drift.

Hermann sets down his bubble-wrapped mass. “If you’re trying to get me to stay, you’re not making a very good argument.”

“Nah, go home. You’ve earned it,” Newt says, and if his happiness sounds just a little bit forced, Hermann makes no comment on it.

“I’m not overly sentimental, but it’s been a pleasure, Dr. Geiszler.”

“Oh, is that what you’re calling it now? A pleasure?” Newt says wryly, but shakes his hand all the same.

 

-

 

Nearly a year passes, and the thought of the entire planet celebrating the destruction of the kaiju makes Newt physically sick. He’d stayed in Hong Kong to research the effects the kaiju remains had on the city, and to try to come up with antidotes for those living close enough to the site to be affected by it. He’s not on the ground physically rebuilding anything, but it’s still very much the dull tedium of disaster relief (as opposed to learning more about opening up rifts and portals through space and time, a much more interesting field of study).

At one point, he proposed another attempt to drift with his kaiju brain, this time with some more up-to-date technology (seeing as how the PPDC no longer needed it), to see what remained of the kaiju homeworld… after which all of his kaiju remains were confiscated.

His first drift still haunts him. Not that he wasn't affected by his second drift, but Hermann had been there with him, and though Newt may want to mock him without fail about all the new things he'd learned about his lab partner, the truth is that Hermann being there made the drift entirely less traumatic, and a lot more of a tangible thing to deal with than the electric blue horror show that was his first drift. He still suffers from nosebleeds (inconvenient), headaches (like an ice pick in his eye), nightmares and flashbacks. He still wakes up screaming every few nights, feral and terrified and unaware of where or what he is. He feels the hollow weight of defeat even though he knows he was on the winning side. His heart still races at the thought of making his last stand, sending three through the breach and wishing they could have sent a hundred…

It’s wrong, he knows it’s wrong, but he still feels it. 

So, faced with the prospects of what will most likely be the largest celebration on the planet, Newt decides he has to get the hell out of Hong Kong.

 

-

 

Oxford in the winter is a stereotype. Perfect flakes of snow glide lazily downward on the wind, swirling and landing on Newt’s eyelashes. His breath fogs up the air in front of his face. The streetlights cast a golden glow that looks like it should be warm to stand under (which it isn’t. it’s still freezing.), lighting Newt’s walk from the train station to the house he has programmed into his phone, which he keeps checking nervously to make sure he hasn’t made a wrong turn.

He walks for hours, tramping through the fresh snow, every so often stepping out of the way of a car driving down the wrong side of the street. He’d pulled the sleeves of his jacket over his hands before jamming them into the pockets of his jeans, but his fingers feel numb and cold. He can’t feel his ears anymore, or any of his face.

Newt is jet-lagged and caffeinated to a familiar level of sluggish trembling, and he has no idea what time it is other than _late_ , but most of the houses he passes are dark, so he could safely assume _very_ late and not be too far from the actual time.

By some karmic miracle, maybe some belated gratitude from Mother Earth for saving her from the big monsters that tried to stomp her into dust, there are lights on in the house when he finally arrives. Newt walks a little closer and sees someone walking around inside. So he feels hardly any guilt at all when he walks up the driveway, right up to the front door, and knocks.

He knocks again, a little harder. He refrains from peeking through the window because he’s already lived through a monster movie and would rather not subject whoever he saw walking around inside to a horror movie. He’s just about to ring the bell when the door opens as far as the chain lock will allow.

Two exhausted looking eyes peer through at him, set in an equally fatigued looking face framed by a dark explosion of curls: Vanessa. “Can I help you?”

“Hello. Is Hermann Gottlieb available?” Newt grimaces at how much he sounds like a child, sincere to the point of aggravation and brimming with the most desperate sort of politeness. He clenches his teeth and tries to transition from grimace to smile, so as not to scare the nice, tired looking lady, but his numb and frozen face betrays him.

“Um… no. He’s asleep.” She sounds suspicious. Newt suddenly feels a lot more guilty for scaring her.

“Oh, that’s ok,” he say, forcefully cheerful and pleasant despite how cheerless and unpleasant he currently feels. “I’ll walk into town and find a hotel, could you tell him, uh… _Doctor Geiszler_ stopped by…?”

The woman’s face softens with a sort of unfamiliar recognition.

“Look, I’m not a maniac, I promise,” he continues, “It’s just…really cold out here. I can come back tomorrow when it’s a better time, I’ve just crossed like three timezones so I feel… really awake right now, you know? I’ll come back tomorrow.”

“Newt?”

Newt stares at her. “…yes?”

She slams the door in his face.

She doesn’t really, just closes it so she can unhook the chain lock. But those three seconds feel so incredibly disappointing that Newt is still feeling like a kicked puppy when she finally opens the door again and pulls him inside.

“You really are freezing,” she says, reaching up to remove his coat. He wants to stop her, but the house is so warm that his protests melt in his throat before he can speak them out loud.

“Yeah… thank you,” he manages to half moan, shutting his eyes and letting his body catch up to this new change of environment.

“Is Hermann expecting you?” Vanessa says, throwing Newt’s jacket over the back of a nearby chair. “He never said anything.”

“No, uh… no he was not,” he pronounces, feeling ridiculous for ever thinking this was a good idea.

“Nessa, are you okay?” Hermann calls from down the hall, his voice rough with fatigue. Clearly, Newt’s inability to speak in normal sound-waves having disturbed Herr Gottlieb’s slumber. He appears moments later looking absolutely wretched, without his cane, Newt notices right away, bracing himself against the wall with one hand and rubbing his eyes with the other.

“Listen,” Newt admonishes, diving right in, “If I was a burglar, if I was some strange man breaking into your house, you’d definitely want to bring your cane with you. I don’t care how comfortable you are in your own home, but you could have definitely used that to beat someone over the head if you were in danger. You’re completely defenseless right now, do you realize that?”

Hermann looks… well, rather manic, quite frankly. Newt would have felt bad if it wasn’t just so precious and hilarious. He’d missed this.

“What the hell are you doing here?” Hermann snaps, rubbing his eyes again.

“Happy, uh… Jaegerversary?” Newt says, still grimacing, still shivering, or maybe now just trembling from the caffeine. “I think that’s what they’re calling it now, I don’t really know, I’m really sorry for just showing up out of the blue like this, it’s just really cold outside…”


	2. baby Gottlieb chews on Newt’s arm, drools on Yamarashi

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Newt wears Hermann's dorky pajamas, has a flashback, and is allowed to hold a baby, for some reason.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I posted a chapter 2 last night, but took it down shortly after when I realized it was really not the story I wanted to be writing. So I changed it all around, gave Hermann some more significant screen time, then got myself back on track. So please erase any memories of last night's preemptive chapter from your mind. Anyway.

The Gottliebs, like a caricature of a happily married couple, have matching robes. Newt wants to laugh, wants to ask them why they didn’t go ahead and get them monogramed while they were at it, but they’re being so nice to him, letting him come inside and get warm and drip melted snow all over their floor, that he’d rather wait until he can feel his fingers and toes again before squandering their kindness (although from the expression on Hermann’s face - pinched, tired, aggravated and _so_ not in the mood - Newt figures that the squandering has already been done).

The Gottliebs also have a baby. His name is Max, and Vanessa has only managed to get him back to sleep just a few minutes before Newt showed up, and his room is just down the hall so if Newt could please just try to keep his voice down, please, for once in his ridiculous life, Hermann would be eternally grateful, thank you, please, thank you very much.

The Gottliebs also haven’t been getting much sleep since said baby Gottlieb came into the picture, evidently. Newt is an expert in sleepless anxiety and overtiredness and could probably recognize the signs blindfolded, so he tries his best to keep his voice down. Eternal gratefulness from Hermann notwithstanding, Newt really does feel bad for waking him. That is, he feels bad in anticipation of the shitstorm of misery he can only expect Hermann to put him through as payback.

Another thing the Gottliebs have is a guest house. At least that’s what Hermann says, tells Vanessa to “go back to bed, I’ll bring Newton to the guest house,” and Newt hopes that there actually is a guest house and that this isn’t just a secret code of the Gottliebs that means Hermann is actually just going to dump him in the backyard and lock him out of the house.

“Wait here, don’t touch anything, and for god’s sake, be quiet,” Hermann says to Newt once Vanessa has gone, leaving him in the kitchen and walking down the hall, reaching out every few steps to brace himself against the wall.

Somehow, Newt manages to keep from calling ‘I’m quiet!’ after him like a whiny child. Somehow. He jams his hands back into his pockets and looks around. Hermann’s left him in a dark and unremarkable part of the house house that he’d rather not stray from for fear of not being able to find his way back.

Hermann’s reappearance is preceeded by the thumping of his cane. He emerges from the shadows like an evil genius, the sharp angles of his face hyper-sharpened in the spooky low light. He stops next to Newt, opening his mouth to say something probably insulting, but then closing his mouth seconds later, probably having thought better than to engage Newt’s arguing skills within hearing range of the baby.

Instead, he hands Newt a terrycloth bundle he’d brought with him and forges ahead, leading Newt through the kitchen, out the back door, down a snow-covered path (checking for ice before every step) and then, slowly and so carefully, up an iron staircase and into, thank god, an actual guest house above the garage.

Still silent, Hermann first switches on a light and then kneels down to do the same to a space heater, which groans like an old man, an obvious kindred spirit of his.

“It should warm up in no time,” he says, adjusting the lever and decidedly not looking at Newt.

Newt kicks his shoes off before stepping onto the carpet, even though Hermann hadn’t bothered.

“I feel like I should say something,” he says, feeling stupid and in the way, and also fairly unsettled. He’d have probably felt more at ease if Hermann had shouted at him and thrown him out, or at least properly told him off for showing up unannounced. This was an unprecedented event, without so much as even a small projectile thrown at his head. He's had years of experience dodging pieces of chalk and would have been perfectly fine, amused, even, rather than taking his shoes off and awkwardly creeping around Hermann’s guest house like a timid and apologetic refugee.

“You just did,” Hermann says.

The face Newt makes at him goes unnoticed, as the man is still communing with the space heater. Newt unwraps the bundle Hermann had given him to find a towel, a pair of pajamas, and a toothbrush.

Finally, Hermann looks up at him. “If you really do feel the need to contribute, you could always start with some gratitude.”

“Yes, right. No, of course,” Newt stammers, feeling even more like a moron. “Thank you.”

The space heater chokes out what sounds like the dying breath of an old man.

“I actually meant that,” Newt continues when he gets no response from Hermann, who probably thinks he’s just saying this because prompted, but seriously when had Newt ever done what he was told? - and so fuck Hermann for even deigning to entertain the thought, because Newt _does_ mean it. “Genuinely. Seriously. Thanks, dude.”

Hermann gets back on his feet, leaning on his cane and groaning like the space heater. “Now, unless there’s anything else to be said that cannot wait until tomorrow, I have to be awake in three hours.”

Newt knows he shouldn’t take this as an invitation, he knows it’s just a formality leading up to Hermann bidding him a snippy goodnight and slamming the door shut behind him. He knows he should just say goodnight, maybe call Hermann “Herms” or something that would equally ruffle him and let him storm off. He knows, but still his mouth opens and the words fly out like it’s the end of the end of the world all over again and there will never be another chance to say it.

“I’m sorry, Hermann, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, and this is stupid and I shouldn’t even be here, just say the word and I’ll leave, I’ll go walk into town, maybe just let me charge my phone a bit.”

As far as end of the world confessions go, this one hardly counts, and Newt feels like he’s missed his moment to say something actually nice to someone who he actually thinks of as a friend, although maybe that’s just because they were in each other’s brain.

Hermann… doesn’t smile. That’s just not how he rolls. But his face does soften, maybe only a little, or maybe Newt is just so exhausted he’s starting to hallucinate. But something does change, and it is blessedly not Hermann’s mind, as the man is still strangely not trying to throw Newt out.

So, whatever it is, Newt will take it.

“Sorry,” he says again, just for good measure.

“You’re tired,” says Hermann Gottlieb, he of the softening face and the generosity of Mother Theresa. “Go to sleep.”

And while Newt, as previously noted, is not the type of person to do what he’s told, he finds no reason to rebel against this particular command. But before he can give in, he first follows Hermann to the door, then holds his breath and listens to make sure the man makes it down the stairs without falling and breaking his neck, then glares at the space heater as it groans in a way that almost sounds like it’s _mocking_ him, and then he puts on the pajamas (which are warm and flannel and button down the front and almost definitely have been worn by Hermann, which makes Newt want to tease him later about his nerdy sleepwear).

After that, he curls up under the three quilts he finds, doesn’t even consider getting back up to brush his teeth, and promptly falls asleep.

 

-

 

The first thing Newt does when he wakes up is check the pillows and sheets for blood. The quilts are dark, but the sheets are an eggshell sort of off-white that would showcase the fruits of a nosebleed rather expertly. Fortunately, everything is clean, save for a small circle of drool, which Newt covers with one of the pillows.

A quick glance at his phone reveals, first, that it has only 2% battery life remaining, and second, that it’s 9:04PM in Hong Kong, which means 2:04 PM in Oxford, which would explain the growling in his stomach that he’d blearily mistaken for additional criticism from his peanut gallery of a space heater.

He is aware that he should get dressed, put his shoes on and head on over to Casa Gottlieb to forage for something to eat, but he is then overcome with a sense that he is seriously trespassing on Hermann’s idyllic life without any real reason to be doing so. There was a balance in the house between the Gottliebs, matching robes and a finally silent baby just down the hall, a balance that Newt decidedly did not fit into.

This feeling, this suffocating, crippling strangeness, keeps Newt in bed for a good long while. His phone battery dies, then his stomach begins to feel like it’s starting to eat itself, and then the space heater seems to ask, “what the fuck is wrong with you?”

That’s enough to scare Newt out of bed, into his shoes (although not his clothes) and out of the guest house. (Well, that, along with the fact that the guest house had a sink but not a toilet, and Newt was not so desperate, he was not so much of a heathen that he was even going to consider using the sink for any other function that wasn’t washing his hands or brushing his teeth. Because seriously? Fucking gross, and fuck you for expecting otherwise from him.)

Clad in Hermann’s seriously nerdy old-man pajamas, Newt makes his way down the iron steps, careful of ice that formed after the previous night’s snowfall. The yard is covered in snow, fluffy and white and so very clean. Newt isn't really sure what to do with himself, whether he can walk in through the back door or if he should go around the front and ring the bell. He settles for knocking on the back door and peering through the glass to see Vanessa holding a baby, of all things.

“Good morning Newt,” she says, and it’s unclear whether her smile is out of friendliness or if she’s just trying not to laugh at what a pathetic sight Newt must be to behold, bedraggled and shivering, in her husband’s pajamas.

“It’s not morning,” Newt replied stupidly, because he’s actually an idiot and for all the barbs he tossed at Hermann he himself doesn’t know all that much about how to talk to humans either. “Is there a bathroom in here? Somewhere?”

Vanessa lets slip a bark of laughter before reigning herself in, then pretending to shush the baby, of all the horrible things to do, my god, the Gottliebs are actually terrible people. Oh my god.

“Down the hall, on your right,” she says, nodding towards a door that Newt is hoping leads to the bathroom because that’s the door he’s going to walk into, and hallelujah, he’s not a total failure, it is a bathroom after all. Nicely done.

Once he’s finished in the bathroom, he goes back to talk to Vanessa (to _face_ Vanessa, who is Newt even kidding), getting ready to apologize profusely for ruining her night.

“How’d you sleep?” She says, cutting him off before he’d even begun.

But Newt is not one to be derailed. “Yeah, I slept okay. Listen, I’m incredibly sorry about last night. I’m embarrassed, mortified, very sorry, I feel terrible-“

"Newt, shush," she says, successfully shushing him like no one has ever been able to do. "Say hello to Max."

“Hi Max, I’m Newt,” he says, as if he were greeting a fully-formed human being rather than a baby. Max responds accordingly, waving his arms around vaguely and blowing an impressive spit bubble.

What happens next is a sort of casual thing that adults do that Newt was never able to wrap his head around: Vanessa just… gives him her baby. She just holds Max out to Newt, basically puts him in Newt's arms, which reflexively come up to hold the baby before Newt is even fully aware of what is happening. Newt can't understand why any adult would ever do this, let alone why anyone in their right mind would give their baby to _him_ , but by that time baby Gottlieb is already in his arms and Vanessa is already backing away and perching on a kitschy bar stool that had no business being anywhere in the home of Hermann Gottlieb.

"Hi," he says again to the baby, really hoping to get an answer from him just to relieve him of this weird awkwardness. "Really?" he says, looking back up to Vanessa, as in, really, you're actually trusting me with your son? With _Hermann's_ son? Are you sure?

"You're fine," she says, grinning in a way that Newt thinks is far more sadistic than it would appear.

"Do I need to, like… support his head?"

"No, you're fine," she says again, and then just watches.

Newt wracks his brains for appropriate things to say. He's had blessedly little time with babies working with the PPDC, and was never particularly fond of them before that - he’d spent most of his academic career being the youngest by far and had been called every variation of “baby” that existed in the English and German languages, which had made him bitter and crotchety and a total badass. He thinks and strains to the best of his genius abilities, but the only thing he can think to ask about is exactly when Hermann and Vanessa had the time to create this guy in the first place. Newt would definitely have noticed.

Or, the truth of the situation, Newt would have only just bagged himself a new kaiju specimen, and would have been so deeply involved that he wouldn't have noticed if Hermann had been fucking a kaiju in the middle of Newt's side of the lab, rather than his smaller and considerably more discreet wife.

“Hi Max,” Newt says again: “Hi.” Suddenly, the baby is looking at him, fat red cheeks and wispy dark hair and blue eyes, blue like Blue, kaiju Blue…

As if from underwater and very, very far away, Newt hears his own voice, suddenly breathless and panicked: “Can you please take him from me? Please, can you take him? Can you…?”

Vanessa swiftly obliges, scooping Max up in her arms and backing away from Newt as if he were a time bomb. Hell, he probably is. His heart is pounding in his ears and Newt can’t bear to look at Vanessa just yet, he’d already made a disastrous first impression the night before, and now here he is making an even worse second impression, she must think he’s a lunatic. He wonders how far from the truth that would actually be.

When he comes back to himself, he finds that he’s sitting in a chair. He touches his nose with his fingertips, then pulls his hand back to find his fingers perfectly clean. He still rubs at his nose anyway, then rubs his hand on his pants, although they aren’t his pants, they’re Hermann’s, they’re his pajamas that Newt’s now ruining…

“…Newt?” Vanessa must have had to say his name a few times to get his attention, her voice is starting to take on that worried tone that Newt despises for how feeble and pathetic it makes him feel. But he looks up at her and the relief on her face is like watching a sunrise.

“Newt, are you hungry? Can I get you something to eat?”

That… was unexpected. Newt had thought she would have swooped in all concerned, depositing Max in some high chair or another so as to better devote some of her mothering onto Newt. Newt would have also been fine with being thrown out, which he’d spent all of the previous night bracing himself for. Newt would have expected a barrage of ‘are you okay?’s, and a frantic call to Hermann, wherever he was, telling him that he has to come home, he has to come and deal with Newt and get him out of the house and away from the baby, please get rid of him…

He doesn’t expect the return of normalcy and to be offered food. No, he’d not been expecting this.

“Yeah,” he manages to say, his voice still sounding pathetically feeble, but maybe it will help if he eats something, so yeah. “Yeah, that would work. Thank you.”

And if Vanessa is terrified (and Newt knows she must be, no if, just definitely freaked), she doesn’t say anything about it.

“I’m sorry,” he says later, speaking quietly to baby Max and planting a little kiss on the top of his head and knowing that Vanessa is well within earshot.

“Kaiju,” he says even later, while Max chews on Newt’s arm and drools all over Yamarashi. “Can you say kaiju? Kaiiiiiiiiju.”

This is the sight that Hermann comes home to, Vanessa and Newt curled up on the couch, the former grinning while the latter has the baby on his lap, but with pillows all around him and said former poised at the ready just in case.

"Netwon," Hermann says, and Newt looks up to find his former lab partner's face getting redder by the second, the knuckles of his left hand going white around the handle of his cane.

"What's up, Herms?”

“Kaaa!” Max says, momentarily detaching his mouth from Newt’s arm.

“Newton," Hermann says again. “I am going to throw you out of my house, so help me, if you are teaching my child…”

He gets too angry to continue. And then he gets an armful of Vanessa and a mouthful of welcome home kisses, and he never finishes that thought.

Of course Hermann doesn't try to actually kick Newt out. He does, however, spend the rest of the evening glaring daggers at him, and most likely trying to kill Newt with his mind, and then maybe while he’s gained the gift of telekenesis he can also get started on erasing any thoughts of ‘kaiju’ from the mind of his child.

By the time Newt realizes that he’s stopped feeling like he’s in the way, said feelings come rushing back. But by then the baby on his lap, the mother at his side and the father slash giant dork clamping his jaw shut in an attempt to contain what will most likely be a nasty comment not meant for the ears of babes are all sufficient enough distractions that keep Newt from professing any more sickeningly heartfelt apologies.

**Author's Note:**

> tbc...


End file.
